High Class in a Steel Town.

This is a small campaign I produced for Wine Loft Pittsburgh that advocated the venue as a place to get together with friends and for social events. The over all tone was intentionally upscale, in keeping with the essence of the Wine Loft brand.

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All signs point to a better education.

Brown Mackie College, a national chain of colleges with a focus on degree programs, needed a campaign that spoke to their target audience (predominantly younger women, often single parents) about enrollment during tough economic times. We agreed that the best tactic for reaching this audience was a robust online presence. I endeavored to create a campaign that was very different for that market, incorporating whimsical "rules" for better living with bold, utility styled graphics. The end result has a lot of stopping power.

The client was so happy with the campaign, I actually produced a series of TV spots based on the look and tone of the banner ads. I even animated the spots in Flash. A first for me.

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Improving their public image.

University of New Mexico Hospitals had a large hurdle to overcome with their public image. For years, UNMH had to overcome the stigma of being the hospital that patched up prison inmates and gang members. In truth, the university backed hospital is the only one in New Mexico that has does real research and where the staff are teachers as well as doctors.

The tactic for breaking this perception was a campaign that personalized the institution by telling the story of survivors and the teams of researchers and practitioners that came together to save them.

The campaign had robust placement and did a very good job of changing the public opinion of the hospital on the whole.

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Hidden in plain sight.

Station Square is an institution in Pittsburgh. It's part of the history and city scape like Point State Park or the US Steel building. This actually posed a problem for Station Square. For years, the destination venue has been loosing business to do lack of awareness and ongoing development of destination sites around it.

The solution for Station Square was two tier. One re-establish the brand as a destination, and then speak more specifically to the attractions that are only available at the Station Square complex.

The use of bold colors and fun headlines made the campaign immediate and personal. The campaign itself was very robust, with bus boards, transit signs, outdoor, print ads, banner ads and a complete redevelopment of the website, as well as fine tuning Station Square's social presence.

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Putting the hot in your sauce.

Santa Fe Ingredients does one thing, and they do it better than anyone. They grow the chile that gives the zing to your favorite brands of Salsa and hot sauces. SFI needed a brand identity for the purpose of promoting themselves to companies like Frito Lay and Kraft Foods. I developed a mark, letterhead, basic products kit and website as tools for their sales people.

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Part of a tradition.

I've had the opportunity over the years to work on some pretty big brands. One of the brands that I'm most proud of is the packaging for Welch's juice cocktail and welchade drinks. Although the logo and treatments have evolved slightly over the years, the fundamental layout and illustration haven't changed in 15 years when we did the initial designs.

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Encouraging abductions for over 30 years.

I think my reason for taking a job with an agency in New Mexico was specific to being able to get my hands on the Roswell UFO Festival account. You would think that a festival in a place as infamous as Roswell would have a turnout like Woodstock. Surprisingly, attendance was not as robust as the city would have liked, nor did they have the marketing budget to really promote it as they would have liked.

The solution was a more robust digital presence. I started by reworking the festival logo, then we set up facebook and twitter pages and let the fans do the work for the festival, advocating it on their own digital feeds. We completely redesigned the website to work harder for the event. Adding, photo galleries, digital feeds and a live news section that people could really refer to for up to the date information on festival.

Our campaign ran very successfully for 2 years. Due to politics, the site we developed is no longer there, but the social fan base is still growing.

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Return of the Debt Monkey.

Almost ten years ago, I helped to create the original Debt Monkey spots. This year, I had the opportunity to bring the Debt Monkey back to life, albeit in a simpler form. I animated these spots as well as wrote the music bed. Simple, message driven spots but fun to animate.

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Big city dining without the city.

Restaurant Echo ia a cosmopolitan, fine-dining venue that you might find in downtown Chicago or New York, but it's based in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. In an attempt to generate awareness and buzz in the local community, I created a brand awareness initiative that centered around a media-rich website. The site incorporates seamlessly integrated video in the background that plays to the venues charm, and offers easy access to menus and current events for the space. In addition, I produced a digital banner campaign for dining sites like OpenTable and UrbanSpoon, as well as targeted local site, and a print initiative that addressed both brand awareness and a banquet-specific call to action.

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Rugged refinement.

This is a print ad campaign I produced for Huntsman Springs, located at the foot of the Teton Mountains in Briggs, ID. It is a nature reserve where, for a premium, you can buy a summer home in an environment dedicated to the consummate outdoors man. The ads advocated this rugged lifestyle by comparing it to the life that pioneers would have had while living the area.

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Banners, banners, banners.

Houston based San Jacinto College wanted a fresh method of reaching out to their target audience (predominantly high school aged students looking to go into vo-tech and degree programs.) We thought it would make a lot of sense to hit them where the spend a lot of time, on the internet. We developed a whole marketing message with a heavy hit on digital media. The message was simple. If you can dream it, you can become it.

To produce these animated web banners, we shot real students on green screen and then animated the backgrounds in and around them. They were designed as ready-play banners that collapsed to standard size at the end when the supers come up.

A fun exercise in pushing web banner capabilities.

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Get some tax relief.

This is a campaign that we produced for the State of New Mexico during a tax amnesty promotion they were running in 2010. Our spin was to treat it like an ad for a pain relief medicine. The campaign got very good response, especially for not using the typical "scare tactic" formula that is so common for this kind of government initiative.

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